Interplay of Flawed ICT Governance and Contextual Realities: A Systematic Review of E-Government Project Failures in Africa

The adoption of e-Government projects by African governments is increasing, but despite their implementation, high rates of failure and abandonment persist, resulting in significant financial losses and few improvements in the provision of public services. One significant challenge is that such failures are mostly associated with technical/infrastructural factors, which means that other underlying factors in the process of ICT projects’ failure and success remain underexplored, including the interaction between ICT governance and environmental factors. This research focuses on the interaction between ICT governance and the environment and its effects on ICT projects. Using the PRISMA model, the literature review identified 42 of 90 articles and employed thematic analysis for theme categorisation. The findings identify four interdependent dimensions of failure: contextual pressures, structural governance weaknesses, rigid process mechanisms, and relational misalignment. These factors interact in a sequential cascade of Context > Structure > Process > Relational, whereby institutional conditions reconfigure governance into a compliance-based model, resulting in reduced flexibility and coordination. This research builds an ICT governance failure model with multiple dimensions and defines the concept of a Governance–Reality Gap. The results show that achieving better ICT project performance requires the concurrent consideration of ICT governance structures and institutional environments.